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Guarding the Great Wall: Modular Combat Units in Concept & Practice
Anushka Saxena
On May 6, 2026, the PLA Daily published an interesting article pertaining to the Eastern Theater Command Navy utilising “plug-and-play” (PaP) modular combat units (即插即用的模块化作战单元) for rehearsing integrated deployments and “systems-of-systems” operational tactics.
Across Chinese-language military press over the past 5 years, the idea of these “plug-and-play” (即插即用) modular combat units has moved from theory/ doctrine to a routine element of combat preparedness drills. In May 2020, a long PLA Daily article by Zhao Zhongqi and Nan Dangshe, “Building New-Type Precision Combat Units (打造新型精确作战单元)” likely delved for the first time into doctrinal commentary on how “foreign militaries” were implementing concepts like joint all-domain operations, joint all-domain command & control, and multi-domain operations. Unmistakably, this is a reference to the US’s JADO/ JADC2/ MDO doctrines.
The authors pointed to the then-evident operational trends in “Syria and several armed conflicts in the Middle East.” These were small-scale elite operations supported by information systems and multi-domain coordination, and were led primarily by Russia and the US. Some examples to jog a memory include Russia’s use, since 2015, of its Reconnaissance-Strike Complex (разведывательно-ударный контур) to integrate real-time, sometimes autonomous, drone-led ISR capabilities with traditional precision strikes using aircraft and long-range missiles. Another is the October 2019 American Operation Kayla Mueller, which was a Special Operations Forces (SOF) small-footprint mission that relied heavily on air defence and ISR.
For the PLA to imbibe such a holistic system-of-systems capability, they argued, the solution lies in an “integrated battalion” (整合营), a tactical unit that integrates precision-strike platforms, command and control, mission planning, and protection elements into a single, small system capable of independent operation. They define it using four parameters:
Plug-and-play modularity,
Independent usability (like a dynamic and versatile SOF brigade),
Ready availability, and
Distributed joint employment (available to all theater commands in any operational direction).
Combined with core PLA concepts of informationisation (信息化) and intelligentisation (智能化), the vision for modular combat units seems like a square fit for an integration-oriented military. And yet, today, we are not necessarily looking at a new type of battalion or PaP unit itself embedded within a theater command, but rather at ideas as to how the goal of birthing modular forces and PaPs can be achieved.
From Theory to Practice
In 5-6 years, the vision for the PaP units has been enhanced to include greater impetus for more inter-service collaboration, interoperability between more systems, and additional features on the units’ roles.
A June 2025 PLA Daily article by Zhu Yisen et al. speaks about 3 types of exercises conducted during that annual field training cycle. The first was an Army air defence brigade conducting joint exercises with Air Force radar units and Army aviation helicopters. The second was an Air Force unit experimenting with optimised joint networking such that “units from different services formed a single network and used a shared ‘language’.” The third pertained to an officer from the 83rd Group Army of the PLA Central Theater Command, reflecting on the “adjustment” (调整) of “handing over” (交出指挥权) command authority to attached Air Force and Rocket Force command structures.
In the first exercise, there are three themes worth noting. One is the idea that any “sense of unfamiliarity” (陌生感) with a situation, where, for example, army aviation and air defence battalions from combined arms brigades are meant to work together, means “bottlenecks” (梗阻点) in integration. Tied to this is the second facet, which pertains to officers figuring out predictable “routines” (套路) of dealing with certain combat drill scenarios because they rarely end up experimenting with new equipment or cross-brigade/ service systems. The third theme is the push to build “collaborative ‘friend circles’” (朋友圈), which can both test real levels of integration, and prepare PaP-style units for contingencies.
Each of these concepts speaks to a unique problem with integration and interoperability within the PLA, and therefore acts as a motivator for the adoption of PaP units, or even practised modularity. For example, to deal with the sense of unfamiliarity and the creation of routines, officers are being deliberately pushed to go beyond the usual drone and jet, and to practice, or at least learn from, what army aviation helicopters or Air Force radar units do. Another thing they do, is create joint air-land confrontation training plans. The goal is to enable pooling of knowledge surrounding background, conditions, and adversaries during planning, so that there is, hopefully, targeted yet shared pooling of resources on a future battlefield.
Now, in the exercise itself, the first tranche of drills involved only air defence battalions (which usually operated missiles and anti-aircraft guns – both SHORAD and MRLS) within CABs of the PLA Ground Forces, alongside Army-based aviation troops. Subsequently, elements such as the Air Force’s radar troops working with CABs were introduced, but not much is said about what they actually do. It’s mostly scene-setting, in that the reportage argues:
“Command posts were established on vehicles, coordinating command and control, reconnaissance and early warning, and fire strikes. In an instant, radars whirred, missiles were erected, and multiple echelons of air defence firepower stood ready.”
In the second exercise, the simulation focuses on converging forces in the air and on the ground, moving towards a target based on coordination between command and control, intelligence, and radar detection. But the thing bringing all modes of information collection together to ensure there is no information asymmetry between jets in the air and armoured vehicles on the ground, is the establishment of a “joint battle link” – a networked communication link that allows each system/ force to share data on ISR with another, so that one can locate and acquire the target, but the other can take the shot (the processes, as the article itself suggests, involve debugging, searching and fire allocation). Of course, the value is in determining the battle-link’s susceptibility to electromagnetic warfare.
In this particular exercise, the report also uses repeatedly the phrase “common language (通用语),” which likely suggests that there is a lingua franca; a common dialect and terminology that removes barriers to quick relay of intelligence, as well as that there are distress signals and/ or operational simplicity linguistics It is nothing unique to the PLA itself – for NATO troops, for example, the lingua franca is english, and some common terminology revolves around its alphabet (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie…).
Another interesting facet in this exercise, at least from my perspective, is who does what. It argues that the fighter jet formation in the air was the first to capture the target on the ground, then shared it with ground-based C2, from which it went to PLAGF missile launchers. In the practice drill itself, there is some degree of rehearsed showing. In an actual conflict, the PLA should hope that collaborating air and land forces do not fight for targetting primacy and turf wars of their own.
The third exercise, involving troops from the 83rd GA transferring command for a few days to learn the ways of leaders from other services, was equally interesting. As Liu Zhen, an officer from a GA’s brigade, opined:
“Unlike in the past, the first thing we did after arriving at our training location was to ‘hand over’ command to the command headquarters of a certain Air Force and Rocket Force unit to which we were assigned. In the past, we have conducted joint air defence training with other branches of the armed forces on many occasions, but this is the first time that we have adjusted the temporary command relationship.”
The basic idea behind this endeavour is to ensure that systems involved in something that has the potential to be very comprehensive and cross-domain, of which ground-based air defence and precision strikes at varied ranges are classic examples, there should be uniformity in standards revolving around formation, site selection, positioning, timing coordination, accuracy mapping, etc. Liu remarks that he is now in charge as commander of this “standardised module” (标准化模块), and hence, it was essential to learn from the strengths and strategies of other branches – in this case, the PLARF and the PLAAF. In fact, to standardise even norms and information interfaces in addition to operational procedures, this exercise also reportedly invited “research institutes” and “industry partners.”
Together Under Water
Then, an April 2026 exercise involving a naval mine countermeasure (MCM) frogman squadron (反水雷蛙人中队) revealed vital facets of how PaP is envisioned. It describes a unit experimenting with team-sized combat units in which sonar operators, mine hunters, and divers, who were previously housed in separate teams, are reorganised into smaller integrated formations capable of completing MCM tasks independently. Imagine it as 3 battalions going from all ‘A’, all ‘B’, and all ‘C’, to 3 combat units like ‘A1B1C1’, ‘A2B2C2’, and ‘A3B3C3’. At any given time, each of these permutated and combined units can be deployed across 3 different naval theaters of contest.
Interestingly, the pushes behind this reorganisation, as articulated in the CCTV report covering the drill, are two. The first is the need for teams to step out of their “little corners” (一亩三分地)* and build a team capable of independently completing MCM operations. Essentially, instead of honing the weakest link in the chain across exercises, the idea is to eliminate the chain entirely. The second push, as the frogman unit’s commander put it, is the requirement to beat smarter minefields with greater speed and accuracy. He argued:
“With the emergence of intelligent minefields, the shortcomings of traditional mine countermeasures operation methods have become increasingly apparent, making them unsuitable for future battlefield needs.”
It is upon this assessment that the unit concluded the need for squad-level combat teams. Further, within each team, the goal is to remove barriers arising from tacit knowledge and distribute a common minimum level of expertise among members. This is because, in one particular previous situation described, although the sonar operator in the squad locked onto a target with relative ease, the diver could not understand the sonar parameters, which led to delays in action and to missing the optimal window for response. On similar lines, another third-class sergeant of a naval squadron, Liu Ri, also expressed his “suffocating helplessness” (那种无力感，比深海的暗流更让人窒息) in the same report from not being able to understand sonar instructions during a search operation in unfamiliar waters.
*Fun Fact: The literal translation of the Chinese phrase used to describe each team’s “little corners” or “narrow turf/ domain,” is “One Mu Three Fen Land.” It is a phrase that dates back to the Ming and Qing dynasties, when it was used to refer to the size of a farmland personally cultivated by imperial rulers in Beijing’s Temple of Agriculture. Eventually, it evolved to denote, or rather criticise, “self-serving behaviour!”
Subsequently, the frogman unit has also initiated a “Nighttime Theory School” (理论夜校) programme, in which officers across the board discuss their experiences and share their insights to spur the implementation of a “one speciality, multiple capabilities” (一专多能) model. Liu apparently became “cross-speciality partners” (跨界搭档) with Li Lei of the sonar imagery department through that school, highlighting that sharing of information and co-learning of skills even at the sub-sub-domain level will be a vital parameter for judging PaP efficacy. Apparently, as a result of divers learning sonar, during another drill near a harbour (likely in the Northern Theater Command Navy), when the sonar operator lost target due to massive interference, divers were able to “predict the target area” and help sonar operators re-lock the target.
By the way, this article also documents an interesting friction between a senior NCO with 2 decades of diving experience, and his younger sailor trainee. He lost a mine-detection competition to the latter, and then set himself the task of learning to interpret sonar imagery from junior operators.
Towards Taiwan
As referenced at the beginning, most recently, a new PaP experience of particularly the Eastern Theater Command Navy (ETC-N) was introduced in the PLA Daily, by authors Hou Yongbo and Xiang Liming. It featured 4 main combined arms training drill elements – a destroyer flotilla of the ETC-N conducting unit-integrated training with forces from other services; a 71st Group Army brigade in which “organisational boundaries were broken down” and elements of “reconnaissance, firepower, assault, and support were disaggregated into functional modules” before being repurposed for specific scenarios; a PLARF brigade modularly reorganising support elements alongside launch units; and an Air Force brigade flexibly allocating radar vehicles and information from neighbouring radar units to enable ground-based air defence strikes. The preferred term for these practices is unit-integrated training (合编合训).
In the first drill, notably, again, the forces involved were all naval. The coordination was to be established between a destroyer, specifically its maritime strike systems, naval air defence forces, and anti-submarine positioning forces. At this level, it is mainly troops within a theater ensuring cross-domain, multi-directional functionality, unlike the battle-link exercise alluded to above.
In the second drill, things get fun, as the various specialised battalions of a brigade under the ETC 71st Group Army (ground forces) tie together with the PLARF for various purposes, basically changing leadership and learning the ways of the Rocket troops, while contributing their own expertise from land-based experiences. Firepower and assault battalions were cited as being prominent, which is fair, given that the latter category includes units with a wide range of capabilities, from mechanised infantry to specialised air assault brigades with attack helicopters.
The emphasis of the exercises was to realise the operational ambition that disaggregating forces into reconfigurable modules makes them comfortable coordinating with a variety of commanders, systems and comrades, while also making commanders themselves more limber across scenarios. This is captured in the post-exercise briefing session led by a veteran with 18 years’ experience, where he remarks:
“The missile is still the same missile, but when to fire it, and with whom to coordinate, is now entirely adapted flexibly based on the battlefield situation.”
Reading the Four Articles Together
Plug-and-play modularity is, in the PLA framing, a central pillar for achieving successes in system-of-systems operations (体系作战). The recurring insistence that small modular units must be “embedded into the system,” making them cogs enabling jointness, rather than being ends in and of themselves.
Two of the four articles emphasise that interoperability requires unified information interfaces, common data formats, and shared operating procedures, and that achieving this requires sustained coordination with research institutes and the defence industrial base. This is where the scope for manipulating training data can likely be reduced. Cross-service standardisation is precisely the kind of friction that bureaucracies generate, and the PLA’s progress on it is among the more important and harder-to-assess questions for analysts.
Finally, the personnel dimension remains important. Modular forces require operators who can step beyond their specialities, but like any military, the PLA will have cross-cutting hierarchies by rank, unit identity (usually favouring the ground forces), and expertise. It may be so that, to the CCTV reporter, one veteran willing to lose and learn from a junior reflects the reality of the full force. In reality, for a military this size, human instincts are both a boon and a bane.
Eye on China is a weekly newsletter curated by the Indo-Pacific Studies Programme at The Takshashila Institution, a public policy think-tank based out of Bengaluru, India.
